According to a summary of country-by-country spending data disclosed by FARA, China has the second highest spending among foreign agents in the United States (the darker the color, the higher the spending), having spent more than $110 million since 2016.
The CCP has been building an information warfare network against the U.S. for years, and in recent years has gone all out in deploying the U.S., spending hundreds of millions of dollars over four years to spread its influence through the “ships” of the U.S. mainstream media. While much of the U.S. mainstream media is controlled by multinational media and entertainment conglomerates, U.S.-China entertainment cooperation has enabled the CCP to play a role.
From 2017-2019, the Communist government-run China Daily has spent more than $37.65 million on U.S. influence. (Taken from OpenSecrets.org)
The Communist government-run China Daily has spent more than $37.65 million on U.S. influence from 2017-2019, according to spending calculations disclosed under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). CCTV (China Central Television) has spent even more money in the U.S., amounting to $48.33 million in 2020 alone. The political response website OpenSecrets.org has been compiling country-by-country spending data disclosed by FARA, and China has the second highest spending among foreign agents in the U.S., having spent more than $110 million since 2016.
Since Trump‘s inauguration in 2017
Total spending by Chinese agents in the U.S. has continued to double, with 2017 and 2019 being two surge years. More than 70% of that was spent by the China Daily, or Big Foreign Affairs. (Taken from OpenSecrets.org)
China Spends Double Trump’s total U.S. spending on Chinese proxies has continued to double since he was inaugurated as president in 2017. Non-government categories of spending in the U.S. that represent the interests of the Chinese Communist government (e.g., CCTV, etc.) have doubled from $7.59 million in 2016 to $16.32 million in 2017 and then doubled again to nearly $35 million in 2019, of which more than 70% was spent by China Daily, also known as Big Foreign Propaganda.
FARA has a registration exemption for “bona fide news or news activities,” but requires that at least 80% of the directors of the media organization be U.S. citizens and that no foreign subject owns, directs, supervises, controls, subsidizes, financially supports, or determines the policies of the media transmission pipeline. Failure to do so requires the label of “agent.
The U.S. edition of China Daily, which is directly affiliated with the Propaganda Department of the CPC Central Committee and the State Council Information Office, is distributed in many major U.S. cities and actively buys advertising in mainstream media, placing CPC-approved public relations articles, and infiltrating congressional offices, particularly in Washington, D.C., in a laminated format in major newspapers such as The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Los Angeles Times. In 2019 alone, China Daily spent nearly $13.79 million to influence U.S. policy and public opinion. In total, China Daily has paid $19 million to mainstream media outlets over the past four years to buy space to run columns that sing the praises of the CCP, such as China Watch.
CCTV Spends 3.5 Times More Than China Daily
CCTV, which has registered as a “China agent” since 2019, has spent even more money.
According to CCTV’s most recent FARA disclosure, it spent a total of nearly $22.8 million for the six months from March to September 2020. (From a document filed by CCTV on the FARA website)
According to CCTV’s latest FARA disclosures, expenses for the six months from March to September 2020 total nearly $22.8 million and $48.33 million for the most recent year. According to CGTN’s North American affiliate’s previous registration documents with FARA (changed to registration with CCTV after 2019), CGTN North America is registered to employ about 180 journalists, and the average monthly salary for a journalist (Journalist) in the U.S. is estimated to be about $6,255, according to salary data from Indeed, one of the largest U.S. job boards. With this estimate, the total annual salary of 180 journalists combined is only $13.51 million.
CCTV U.S. spending, doubled in 2020 compared to 2019. (Taken from OpenSecrets.org)
Where exactly is CCTV America’s largest single expense – $37.17 million a year in hiring expenditures – spent?CCTV vaguely discloses in its filings that “MediaLinks news gathering and production activities are conducted by professional journalists, primarily U.S. citizens. To expand the scope of its news coverage, MediaLinks also maintains commercial arrangements with a number of news organizations, including NBC News, CNN, Reuters, the Associated Press and Agence France-Presse.” What kind of commercial arrangements CCTV does not account for.
In fact, it was only under pressure that China Daily, which has been operating in the U.S. for 40 years, first filed detailed accounts of its spending in the U.S. with the U.S. Department of Justice in 2019, confessing its commercial relationships with U.S. newspapers. CCTV, which has a much larger commercial arrangement, did not disclose specific details.
A Vague and Covert “Borrowing the Boat to Go to Sea”
In an article titled “Characteristics of Chinese Media’s “Borrowing Ships to Go to Sea”, Foreign Communications on the mainland introduced that the most important “borrowing ships to go to sea” model for Chinese media is to co-run daily newspapers and Chinese weekly magazines, and co-run special editions (there are also co-run foreign-language weekly magazines, and distribution with foreign newspapers).
One of the most notable instances of so-called foreign newspaper distribution was when China Daily included a four-page supplement called “China Watch” in the Des Moines Chronicle during the 2018 U.S. midterm elections to incite discontent among Iowa farmers against Trump. Although the ad was an insert, it was more of a Chronicle story, prompting a strong response from Trump slamming China for meddling in the election.
The article “Lend a Boat to the Sea” also contrasts that the overseas expansion of international mainstream media is more of an economic act than a form of “cooperation” with unclear property rights (like China’s “Lend a Boat to the Sea”), much less control over publishing and distribution through profit transfer.
The article “Study on the Strategy of “Borrowing Ships to Go to Sea” for the People’s Daily on the mainland says, “Practice has proven that ‘borrowing ships to go to sea’ can make foreign communication work with half the effort, and the key to determining whether this strategy can really work is the content provided by Chinese media. The key to the effectiveness of this strategy is the content provided by the Chinese media.” “Chinese media should also actively explore ways to develop overseas cooperation. For example, acquiring foreign media companies altogether, maintaining an absolute controlling stake in foreign media, holding partial stakes in foreign media companies and forming partnerships with foreign media through content sharing.”
U.S. Mainstream Media and China in Tune
On December 18, 2020, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo criticized major U.S. media outlets for bending over backwards to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) because of their interests, not only underreporting CCP violations, but worse, sometimes the media outlets are aiding CCP propaganda. Pompeo also cited the CCP as a challenge that poses a real existential threat.
Speaking to The Mark Levin Show, a well-known conservative radio program, Pompeo said that day, “The media giants have a business [in China], right? China has 1.4 billion people, and they want to serve that market, so they want to sell movies or stream products there, so they often bow down on their knees.” “So unfortunately that means that their news outlets are also often reluctant to report on these violations in China; and worse, sometimes they actually promote China (the Chinese Communist Party). That’s the worst.”
In fact, the mainstream media in the U.S. and China have emerged in surprisingly consistent steps in covering the Chinese epidemic, the election and lambasting U.S. Secretary of State Pompeo. For example, Washington Post, April 28, 2020: “Pompeo and Trump should stop using the WHO as a scapegoat for their own failed response to the epidemic.”
CCTV news client, July 27, 2020: The New York Times, Financial Times and others criticized Pompeo’s speech in the same breath for “growing appetite for sanity”. The article lists a group of Western mainstream media that “condemned” U.S. Secretary of State Pompeo’s “blatantly anti-China speech”: CNBC, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Washington Post, Financial Times, Bloomberg.
On January 5, 2021 the New York Times published an article: “In a chaotic pandemic world, China offers its own version of freedom”. The article says: “The West may find that it [the West] has to work harder to sell its own vision of ‘freedom’ after China has made its model so appealing.” China “feels a bit like the ‘future world’ of Disneyland.”
U.S. media mostly controlled by entertainment media companies
Most major media in the U.S. is controlled not by media companies but by entertainment media companies, and the U.S.-China entertainment partnership has enabled the Chinese Communist Party to play a role.
To understand the media loophole, you should know some of the affiliations.
(1) NBC News, CNBC and MSNBC are owned by Comcast, which also owns Universal Pictures, the only foreign partner in the five state-run companies in Universal Beijing Resort, which is expected to open this year. The theme park will attract licensed properties such as “Harry Potter” and “Transformers,” which are owned by Warner Pictures and Paramount Pictures, giving Beijing a point of pressure on several U.S. media companies. announced a joint deal worth $500 million in film financing.
According to the website of the Chinese Consulate in New York, on February 27, 2020, Consul General in New York Huang Ping met with Comcast executives, who said, “China’s prevention and control practices have gained valuable time and experience for other countries …… We want (Comcast-owned) NBC and other U.S. media to report on China objectively and fairly…”
(2) ABC News is owned by Walt disney, which also owns Walt Disney Studios and has a 43 percent stake in the Shanghai Disneyland Resort. The resort attracted 11 million visitors in its first year of operation and is a major source of revenue for Disney. Disney also owns 80% of ESPN, which sent a memo to employees internally forbidding them from discussing Chinese politics after Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey’s tweet in support of the Hong Kong protesters.
(3) CBS News is owned by Viacom CBS, which also owns Paramount Pictures and ViacomCBS Networks International, which produces MTV and Nickelodeon for the Chinese market.
(4) CNN is owned by WarnerMedia, which also controls NBA TV, whose broadcasts in China were suspended in 2019 after Daryl Morey’s tweet in support of Hong Kong protesters prompted the league and its major players to distance themselves from the Hong Kong protests. WarnerMedia also has a 49 percent stake in Hong Kong-based film production company Flagship Entertainment, whose other major shareholder is Shanghai-based China Media Capital. China is the second largest film market in the world after North America, with a market size of more than $9 billion. It is expected to be the world’s largest market by 2025, with sales expected to reach $22 billion, a key to future revenue growth for Hollywood. Several big-budget U.S. films have recently premiered in China to more box office than they did in the U.S.
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